Wow! The Large Hadron Collider actually works

The Large Hadron Collider on the outskirts of Geneva. Photograph: CERN / Rex Features

My first reaction to these collisions that we have seen at Cern in the Large Hadron Collider's detectors was Wow! This looks great! I gave my first lecture on the physics of the LHC more than 25 years ago, so to see its first high-energy collisions was a real relief! Of course, these are not the most interesting events we will see. However, they are important. They tell us is that this is what nature normally produces when it flies together particles at really high energies.

Surprisingly, it appears nature produces more debris from each collision than expected, though that is just a first impression. Nor will it make it any harder to carry out physics on the collider. However, it is something to start thinking about straightaway.

So far, we have only had a few million high-energy collisions. However, when the collider is in full operation we should get about one billion a second though our engineers will have to do a lot of work to achieve that. At the present, we are only sending two bunches of protons in opposite directions round the LHC to get them to collide. In future we will send thousands of bunches round. We will also need to put more protons into each bunch and also pack them in more tightly so we get higher collision rates.

I think there is a good chance we will see evidence of syupersymmetrical particles which will explain the existence of the dark matter that we believes permeates the cosmos. However, it will take longer to find the Higgs boson, the particle which is thought to explain the existence of mass in the universe. That could easily take three or four years.

However, something else –something completely unexpected – could be discovered long before then, possibly by the end of this year. We could find that quarks are made of something smaller or that there is a new fundamental force that we knew nothing about. And that would be great. If we run the collider and just find what we had predicted, then we would not really be learning anything. I want the LHC to be remembered for something that we have never previously talked about.